The Landscape

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_6.html

There are lots of sfnal ideas in this collection of dangerous visions
at the Edge. Here, relevant to the recent thread on science fiction vs
fantasy, is Leonard Susskind:

The "Landscape"

I have been accused of advocating an extremely dangerous idea.

According to some people, the "Landscape" idea will eventually ensure
that the forces of intelligent design (and other unscientific religious
ideas) will triumph over true science. From one of my most
distinguished colleagues:

From a political, cultural point of view, it's not that these
arguments are religious but that they denude us from our historical
strength in opposing religion.

Others have expressed the fear that my ideas, and those of my friends,
will lead to the end of science (methinks they overestimate me). One
physicist calls it "millennial madness."

And from another quarter, Christoph Schönborn, Cardinal Archbishop of
Vienna has accused me of "an abdication of human intelligence."

As you may have guessed the idea in question is the Anthropic
Principle: a principle that seeks to explain the laws of physics, and
the constants of nature, by saying, "If they (the laws of physics) were
different, intelligent life would not exist to ask why laws of nature
are what they are."

On the face of it, the Anthropic Principle is far too silly to be
dangerous. It sounds no more sensible than explaining the evolution of
the eye by saying that unless the eye evolved, there would be no one to
read this page. But the A.P. is really shorthand for a rich set of
ideas that are beginning to influence and even dominate the thinking of
almost all serious theoretical physicists and cosmologists.

Let me strip the idea down to its essentials. Without all the
philosophical baggage, what it says is straightforward: The universe is
vastly bigger than the portion that we can see; and, on a very large
scale it is as varied as possible. In other words, rather than being a
homogeneous, mono-colored blanket, it is a crazy-quilt patchwork of
different environments. This is not an idle speculation. There is a
growing body of empirical evidence confirming the inflationary theory
of cosmology, which underlies the hugeness and hypothetical diversity
of the universe.

Meanwhile string theorists, much to the regret of many of them, are
discovering that the number of possible environments described by their
equations is far beyond millions or billions. This enormous space of
possibilities, whose multiplicity may exceed ten to the 500 power, is
called the Landscape. If these things prove to be true, then some
features of the laws of physics (maybe most) will be local
environmental facts rather than written-in-stone laws: laws that could
not be otherwise. The explanation of some numerical coincidences will
necessarily be that most of the multiverse is uninhabitable, but in
some very tiny fraction conditions are fine-tuned enough for
intelligent life to form.

That's the dangerous idea and it is spreading like a cancer.

Why is it that so many physicists find these ideas alarming? Well, they
do threaten physicists' fondest hope, the hope that some
extraordinarily beautiful mathematical principle will be discovered: a
principle that would completely and uniquely explain every detail of
the laws of particle physics (and therefore nuclear, atomic, and
chemical physics). The enormous Landscape of Possibilities inherent in
our best theory seems to dash that hope.

What further worries many physicists is that the Landscape may be so
rich that almost anything can be found: any combination of physical
constants, particle masses, etc. This, they fear, would eliminate the
predictive power of physics. Environmental facts are nothing more than
environmental facts. They worry that if everything is possible, there
will be no way to falsify the theory - or, more to the point, no way
to confirm it. Is the danger real? We shall see.

Another danger that some of my colleagues perceive, is that if we
"senior physicists" allow ourselves to be seduced by the Anthropic
Principle, young physicists will give up looking for the "true" reason
for things, the beautiful mathematical principle. My guess is that if
the young generation of scientists is really that spineless, then
science is doomed anyway. But as we know, the ambition of all young
scientists is to make fools of their elders.

And why does the Cardinal Archbishop Schönborn find the Landscape and
the Multiverse so dangerous. I will let him explain it himself:

Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific
claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology
invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design
found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human
nature by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is
real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of
design as the result of 'chance and necessity' are not scientific at
all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.

Abdication of human intelligence? No, it's called science.

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_5.html

Here's Brian Greene:

The Multiverse

The notion that there are universes beyond our own - the idea that we
are but one member of a vast collection of universes called the
multiverse - is highly speculative, but both exciting and humbling.
It's also an idea that suggests a radically new, but inherently risky
approach to certain scientific problems.

An essential working assumption in the sciences is that with adequate
ingenuity, technical facility, and hard work, we can explain what we
observe. The impressive progress made over the past few hundred years
is testament to the apparent validity of this assumption. But if we are
part of a multiverse, then our universe may have properties that are
beyond traditional scientific explanation. Here's why:

Theoretical studies of the multiverse (within inflationary cosmology
and string theory, for example) suggest that the detailed properties of
the other universes may be significantly different from our own. In
some, the particles making up matter may have different masses or
electric charges; in others, the fundamental forces may differ in
strength and even number from those we experience; in others still, the
very structure of space and time may be unlike anything we've ever
seen.

In this context, the quest for fundamental explanations of particular
properties of our universe - for example, the observed strengths of
the nuclear and electromagnetic forces - takes on a very different
character. The strengths of these forces may vary from universe to
universe and thus it may simply be a matter of chance that, in our
universe, these forces have the particular strengths with which we're
familiar. More intriguingly, we can even imagine that in the other
universes where their strengths are different, conditions are not
hospitable to our form of life. (With different force strengths, the
processes giving rise to long-lived stars and stable planetary systems
- on which life can form and evolve - can easily be disrupted.) In
this setting, there would be no deep explanation for the observed force
strengths. Instead, we would find ourselves living in a universe in
which the forces have their familiar strengths simply because we
couldn't survive in any of the others where the strengths were
different.

If true, the idea of a multiverse would be a Copernican revolution
realized on a cosmic scale. It would be a rich and astounding upheaval,
but one with potentially hazardous consequences. Beyond the inherent
difficulty in assessing its validity, when should we allow the
multiverse framework to be invoked in lieu of a more traditional
scientific explanation? Had this idea surfaced a hundred years ago,
might researchers have chalked up various mysteries to how things just
happen to be in our corner of the multiverse, and not pressed on to
discover all the wondrous science of the last century?

Thankfully that's not how the history of science played itself out, at
least not in our universe. But the point is manifest. While some
mysteries may indeed reflect nothing more than the particular universe,
within the multiverse, we find ourselves inhabiting, other mysteries
are worth struggling with because they are the result of deep,
underlying physical laws. The danger, if the multiverse idea takes
root, is that researchers may too quickly give up the search for such
underlying explanations. When faced with seemingly inexplicable
observations, researchers may invoke the framework of the multiverse
prematurely - proclaiming some or other phenomenon to merely reflect
conditions in our bubble universe - thereby failing to discover the
deeper understanding that awaits us.

.

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